10 Benefits Of Canada’s New 0% Population Growth Rate

In October, the Trudeau government buckled to rising anger over skyrocketing immigration levels and slashed permanent resident admissions while keeping in place previous restrictions on foreign worker and international student numbers.

The federal government promised these measures would “pause population growth in the short term to achieve well-managed, sustainable growth in the long term”. Specifically, population growth was forecasted to decline by -0.2% in both 2025 and 2026, before returning to +0.8% in 2027.

Some questioned the feasibility of going from +3.2% in 2023 (adding nearly 1.3 million newcomers in a single year) to -0.2% in 2025. I was one of them, writing an article for Epoch Times titled Canada’s ‘Pause’ on Immigration-Driven Population Growth May Be a Statistical Illusion. I relied on a report by CIBC Deputy Chief Economist Benjamin Tal – just one of several bank reports that have cast doubt on Ottawa’s ambitious population growth reduction plan. Here is what I wrote:

“The CIBC report takes issue with Statistics Canada’s projection that population growth will dramatically decline from 3.2 percent in 2023 (an astonishing rate that ranked us roughly on par with sub-Saharan African countries like Angola)…The report argues that this projection is overly optimistic in that it overestimates the number of non-permanent residents (mostly international students and foreign workers) who will leave the country in the next two years, and undercounts asylum seekers.”

Thankfully, I was wrong. On June 18th, StatsCan published its official population estimates for the first quarter of 2025, informing Canadians that there had been “almost no increase in the population size of Canada” during the first three months of the year. From January 1st to April 1st, the population increased by just 20,107 people – or in percentage terms, 0.0%. This was due to a reduction in permanent and temporary resident admissions, a significant outflow of temporary residents (particularly international students), and a greater proportion of new permanent residents being selected from the large pool of temporary residents already on Canadian soil.

The federal government’s narrative is that 0% population growth for the next couple of years is a “pause” – a breather, if you will – to allow for systems like housing, healthcare, and social services to catch up before the country starts growing through immigration once more. This assumption that our population must expand endlessly through immigration is predicated on a growth ideology whose weaknesses have been thoroughly exposed by Canadian environment and population experts John Meyer and Madeline Weld. Instead of revving up the immigration engines after our 0% population growth breather, why not embrace population stability and the broader societal stability that flows from it?

Here is a small sample of some of the many benefits that Canadians of all backgrounds can expect from 0% population growth:

1) Cheaper houses

While the assertion that immigration inflates housing prices previously invited accusations of xenophobia, it has now become widely acknowledged across Canada’s political spectrum. After all, this common sense statement is a simple matter of supply and demand. Over the last several decades, open door immigration policies pursued by successive governments have jacked up demand so severely that millions of young Canadians are giving up on forming households of their own, according to a new study from UBC.

As a result of reckless immigration policies, Canada faces a shortfall of 3.5 million housing units. With 0% population growth, Canada can work on catching up on this shortfall instead of digging ourselves further into the hole. As supply comes closer to aligning with demand, prices should decline.

2) Lower rent

As the federal government’s October immigration cut has taken effect, rent has been gently declining in much of urban Canada. In an increasing number of cases, the landlord-tenant power dynamic we are used to is being reversed, as population growth starved landlords are forced to offer incentives to prospective renters. Here’s how an article published a month ago in Over Here Toronto described the situation:

“Real estate experts note that the urgency has disappeared. Units no longer get snapped up within hours of being listed. Landlords are now offering perks to attract tenants. One month of free rent is becoming common—something unheard of during Toronto’s rental boom.”

3) More job opportunities

StatsCan clearly states that Canada’s rising unemployment in 2023 and 2024 was driven by population growth outpacing job growth:

“The employment rate trended down for most of 2023 and 2024, as population growth outpaced employment gains. More recently, the employment rate had increased for three consecutive months from November 2024 to January 2025, driven by strong employment gains amid slower population growth [bolding added].”

This phenomenon is felt first-hand by Canadian families across the country, as teenagers seeking a summer job hand in dozens of applications at fast food restaurants and malls only to be outcompeted by international students and foreign workers.

With a stable population, employers have constricted access to this reserve army of overseas foreign labour.

4) Higher wages

Because of supply and demand, in a high population growth scenario, landlords have power over tenants. Similarly, bosses have power over workers in the same scenario. With 0% population growth, the power dynamics in each relationship are reversed. Landlords must compete for tenants, and bosses must compete for workers.

Not only does high immigration raise the total number of workers, but in the Canadian context specifically, it drags down wages by flooding the labour market with workers who earn less than the native-born: “Immigrants to Canada experience poor earnings relative to native-born workers. This is a well-documented fact, one whose root causes have been extensively investigated over the last 30 years”.

This is one of the major reasons why, before the advent of political correctness, labour unions used to passionately endorse immigration restriction.

5) More accessible healthcare

More than one in five Canadians do not have a family doctor. According to an analysis by SecondStreet.org, an estimated 28,077 patients died in fiscal year 2023-2024 on waiting lists for surgeries or diagnostic scans. In many towns, walk-in clinics are a thing of the past. Hospitals are overcrowded, with emergency rooms packed to the brim and patients waiting 22 hours or more for a hospital bed.

The fundamental reason is simple: unsustainable immigration levels. In every analysis or official report on Canada’s healthcare predicament, there is invariably an acknowledgement that our healthcare system is not keeping up with population growth. Needless to say, in Canada the term “population growth” corresponds to “immigration”. Since Prime Minister Brian Mulroney abandoned Canada’s historic “tap on, tap off” immigration policy in 1990, consistently high population growth has weakened our healthcare system. In 1990, the average number of hospital beds per 1000 Canadians was 5.99; by 2022, this had plummeted to 2.53 per 1000.

In healthcare, like every other field, population stability means putting quality of life ahead of quantity of life.

6) Higher GDP per capita

On January 15th 2024, the National Bank of Canada released a bombshell report explaining that, through a policy of mass immigration, Canada had fallen headlong into a “population trap” – a situation that has “historically been the preserve of emerging economies” in places like sub-Saharan Africa. In a population trap, any increase in living standards is rendered impossible: “Our population is growing so fast that we do not have enough savings to stabilize our capital-labour ratio and achieve an increase in GDP per capita”.

While mass immigration has been shown to lower GDP per capita, Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Officer has confirmed that the Liberal government’s immigration U-turn will raise GDP per capita.

7) Reduced pressure to pave over farmland

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau often cited diversity as Canada’s greatest strength, a dubious claim that has yet to be backed up by data. Canada’s stock of excellent agricultural land, on the other hand, could easily fit the bill as one of our greatest strengths as a country. In an increasingly unstable world, food security is of the utmost importance.

Because much of our prime farmland is in the south, near our biggest cities which contain most of our population, accommodating immigration-driven population growth means paving over valuable farmland. According to Canadians for a Sustainable Society, Canada loses 530 square kilometres of prime farmland near our large urban areas for every million people we add to the population – and remember, we added well over a million people in 2023 alone!

8) Less classroom overcrowding

Classrooms are being overcrowded by immigration – just like hospitals, food banks, social services, and roads. When the federal government artificially inflates demand for these services and amenities by inviting in large numbers of new residents from other countries, a spanner is thrown in the works.

In Prince Edward Island, Charlottetown and Stratford received 375 newcomer students who were neither predicted nor planned for. Surrey, BC’s fastest growing municipality, is being forced to use 400 portables as its classrooms overflow – some high school students in the community are attending class in shifts because of the overcrowding.

9) Reduced road congestion and transit overcrowding

For many Canadians, traffic is a daily irritant. Toronto is now the third most congested city in North America, with Torontonians spending 118 hours stuck in traffic every year. Surrey’s local government is desperately calling for a “transit plan” amid a population boom that has seen the city grow by an astonishing 191,500 people in the last decade.

The common factor is population growth. With an endlessly growing population, Canada is forced to devote endless amounts of energy, time, and taxpayer money to the useless task of endlessly expanding road and transit networks. The opportunity cost of such fruitless endeavours is staggering to consider – what useful projects could we be pursuing as a country if we did not have to devote considerable resources to accommodating infinity immigration?

With a stable population, we can focus on upgrading our existing infrastructure instead of constantly building new, mediocre infrastructure all over the place.

10) Stronger social cohesion

As a result of Canada’s open door immigration policy, the proportion of foreign-born residents in the country has risen to 23%. One of the most observable consequences of this risky social experiment is the steady erosion of social cohesion and the fragmenting of national identity.

In September 2023, 150 Eritreans clashed in the parking lot of Calgary’s Falconridge plaza, armed with sticks and pipes. Similar clashes occurred in Edmonton and Toronto. The origin of the disputes was a difference of views about the government in Eritrea. In November of 2023, viral videos emerged of a clash between Hindus and Sikhs on Diwali in Mississauga. These are just two of a large number of examples of similar communitarian clashes that have occurred along ethnocultural fracture lines. Conflicts with deep roots in faraway regions of the world have been brought to Canada through heavy immigration from those regions combined with little effort to assimilate newcomers.

With 0% population growth, our society can focus on the considerable task of assimilating the diasporas already on Canadian soil instead of continually importing new diasporas. A stable population smooths the way for a peaceful, orderly, calm society.